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This game, along with Master of Magic, Civ 1, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dune 2, were the beginnings of strategy gaming for me. It's amazing to see that most of t

This game, along with Master of Magic, Civ 1, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dune 2, were the beginnings of strategy gaming for me. It's amazing to see that most of these games have been remade or copied (Stellaris, Age of Wonder, Civ 6, XCOM 2, Star Craft, respectively), and that the genre lives on.

meesles 7y ago
I love it. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces. Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming. It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!
yyyk 7y ago
Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO). It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.
- the_af 7y ago
  See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course! Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)
  - CDSlice 7y ago
    Stellaris doesn't have much tech or fleet micro. However, there is a _massive_ amount of planet (or more specifically, population) micro. You have to manually build up each planet and move the extra pops that grow to wherever they are most needed. Once you get to the late game and you have 20-30+ planets the game really becomes a slog to micro and game performance drops a ton. I still love Stellaris despite these flaws, but they are pretty big flaws.
    - the_af 7y ago
      Thanks! Pretty big flaws indeed. Not the game for me then.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement. Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired. For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
    - mntmoss 7y ago
      The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
the_af 7y ago
Agreed. XCOM (the original) to this day remains one of my favorite turn-based games. How you grew attached to your troopers! The remake is pretty good, too. How do you find Stellaris, by the way? I'm tempted by it but at the same time these days I simply don't have time for time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun.
- bllguo 7y ago
  > time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun pretty much covers Stellaris. It might have been salvageable if the world were interesting, but despite all the ways they let you customize your faction I never feel any attachment to them, to say nothing about the AI-controlled factions. Other games may have only a few factions but they all feel genuinely unique and different.
- ppeetteerr 7y ago
  I didn't enjoy Stellaris as much as I remember enjoying MOO. However, the latest version of MOO is just okay. MOO 2 and Ascendancy were by far my favorite. I say this, but that was decades ago. How about yourself?
  - the_af 7y ago
    Haven't tried the new MOO. I remember enjoying MOO and MOO2 back in the day. And of course, Ascendancy! But would I have the patience to play them nowadays? I don't know...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cabaalis 7y ago
Aside from some simple BASIC, I can attribute the beginning of my development career to being a kid playing with the text-based config files of Civ 1.
- ppeetteerr 7y ago
  I used to use a hex editor to modify my XCom save files to max the stats of my soldiers and my money :)

meesles 7y ago

I love it. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces. Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming. It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!

yyyk 7y ago

Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO). It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.

the_af 7y ago
See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course! Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)
- CDSlice 7y ago
  Stellaris doesn't have much tech or fleet micro. However, there is a _massive_ amount of planet (or more specifically, population) micro. You have to manually build up each planet and move the extra pops that grow to wherever they are most needed. Once you get to the late game and you have 20-30+ planets the game really becomes a slog to micro and game performance drops a ton. I still love Stellaris despite these flaws, but they are pretty big flaws.
  - the_af 7y ago
    Thanks! Pretty big flaws indeed. Not the game for me then.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement. Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired. For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
  - mntmoss 7y ago
    The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.

the_af 7y ago

Agreed. XCOM (the original) to this day remains one of my favorite turn-based games. How you grew attached to your troopers! The remake is pretty good, too. How do you find Stellaris, by the way? I'm tempted by it but at the same time these days I simply don't have time for time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun.

bllguo 7y ago
> time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun pretty much covers Stellaris. It might have been salvageable if the world were interesting, but despite all the ways they let you customize your faction I never feel any attachment to them, to say nothing about the AI-controlled factions. Other games may have only a few factions but they all feel genuinely unique and different.
ppeetteerr 7y ago
I didn't enjoy Stellaris as much as I remember enjoying MOO. However, the latest version of MOO is just okay. MOO 2 and Ascendancy were by far my favorite. I say this, but that was decades ago. How about yourself?
- the_af 7y ago
  Haven't tried the new MOO. I remember enjoying MOO and MOO2 back in the day. And of course, Ascendancy! But would I have the patience to play them nowadays? I don't know...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cabaalis 7y ago

Aside from some simple BASIC, I can attribute the beginning of my development career to being a kid playing with the text-based config files of Civ 1.

ppeetteerr 7y ago
I used to use a hex editor to modify my XCom save files to max the stats of my soldiers and my money :)